Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Bias for Collectivism

Last night I watched a great interview, Friedrich Hayek with James Buchanan. (Thanks to Emily Skarbek at Econlog for the post which led me to that 1978 interview.)

A few snippets from that interview confirm my belief that the Resource-Patterns Model of Life RPM leads us beyond Hayek's contribution.

Around 31:08 Hayek says "Our whole knowledge is the knowledge of a pattern, essentially." Hayek does not say more about where the pattern is or how it influences social order. But, I claim, Hayek's pattern equates in RPM to a pattern of resources in the environment, an RP in model's jargon.

Later in that interview around 44:28 Buchanan asks, "How do you explain the revival, so to speak, of sort of Marxist notions, in so much of Europe now and to some extent in this country?"

Hayek replies, "I don't know."

But a researcher who works with RPM can know. RPM offers a definite answer to Buchanan's question:

Because there are resource patterns of which living things have yet to "learn", evolution will often award domination to those populations of LTs disposed to seek orderly cooperation before any pattern is yet known — to those populations disposed to believe that an order must exist and will be found.

While this insight has seemed clear to me for the past 20 years, and while I have been trying to communicate it, few people [0–3] have understood it. So I continue in this blog trying to spell it out more completely. Thank you for your patience with my insufficient descriptions.

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